This will digress quite a bit, but that's ok....

Lois Lane got out from under Superman's thumb in her own comic during the sixties which, like Wonder Woman, by the late sixties and early seventies were written to promote anti-male, women's lib fanaticism.

The comics have pretty much always been left of center. Artists, writers and the creative community generally form an acute angle of liberal thought. During the forties patriotism was mandatory, but tons of titles were quite often full of sicko gratuitous violence, bondage, sadism and content appealing largely to fetishists. Before TV and video, the sickos had to get their kicks from comic books and sleaze pulps.

After the comics code appeared in the early fifties they cleaned up their act but have been awaiting the day they could sink back into the gutter and depict the most pathological stuff to kids. Now most titles don't carry the comics code and at the same time the leftists have had nothing new to say since 1969, so sales just go down.

The average comic buyer of today is no longer a kid but rather a middle-class male adult who gets their kicks buying books in which some 'artist' draws 20 pages of people getting offed, beaten bloody or immolated - blood is artistically strewn through the pages. Yes, it's a generalization, but nevertheless an apt summary of the comics churned out today.

They wanted to put 'graphic' back into graphic artist and they have.

Ever notice that to get sales they have to "kill off" a character? The comic writers are so bad they can't come up with a good storyline to save their life. And so again they return to the staple of their existence - violence. "Snuff Captain America! Even the name 'America' is repulsive to me! Let's use the story to bash our Amerikan government and all the so-called 'normal' evil bigots, homophobes and churchgoers that support it."

Comics therefore are used to appeal mostly to misfits. Most misfits have a persecution complex and the government, the traditional family unit, the church, etcetera - which represent in their minds condemning authority figures - are their targets. This naturally crosses over the borders of the comic industry and into all mainstream entertainment where the same maxims hold true:

Retributional violence sells to misfits with persecution/inferiority complexes.

Spiderman is the classic example, where the 'nerd' after years of being bullied and tormented is granted his wish and given superhuman strength and abilities and while still taking abuse in his 'normal' identity can dish it out to the bullies and thugs when he puts on the costume.

Readers who love/loved spiderman all felt persecuted to one degree or another. They could relate and secretly they were punching their persecutors with every blow Spiderman landed on a 'bad guy'. If Spiderman is somebody's favorite comic you now know why. If they can't relate to persecution/retribution then what's the appeal? Someone putting on tights and shooting webs out of his hands and swinging around buildings? Huh?

Superman is for the sexually repressed folks. Clark Kent, who is superman, is the ultimate repressed guy. While never bullied as much as Peter Parker, he takes guff for being wimpy and not masculine, while his alter-ego is the epitome of masculinity and is adored by women who never look twice at Clark Kent. If readers love Superman - their hang up is equally transparent.

Captain America is a throwback. When fighting Nazis, he had a purpose, and appealed to weak soldiers who wished for a "super serum" to kick Nazi butt, but after the war was over his appeal was very slim, for the very reason that he was designed to appeal to all those both at the front and the homefront who felt ineffectual and impotent.

Captain America therefore is a wartime super hero character, and here we are with a perfect opportunity to exploit what he was created for and they can't find a writer who even knows how to use him properly!

So they kill him instead, and publicize it to the moon, reaping the short-term profit windfall.

That's pretty much par for the course.